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It’s hard for me (or perhaps any web designer) to say but IE has certainly come a long way since IE6. There was once a time when uttering the words ‘Internet Explorer’ would send a chill down any developers spine. In recent years things have gotten better though, and pretty soon IE11 will be coming out. What should we expect? Is it actually a good browser?

Evergreen

It’s been a while now since Microsoft announced IE would join the ranks of so called evergreen browsers, i.e. (haha, hilarious) browsers that automatically update, and we definitely have seen that happening with the rapid switch from IE9 to IE10. It means we as developers no longer have to worry about the lingering threat of another Internet Explorer with shoddy support for CSS and HTML.

However, whereas Chrome and Firefox tend to see rapid uptakes of new versions within a month, the IE cycle seems a bit slower with IE9 taking since February to drop down a significant amount to still just about 5% of the market according to data on StatCounter.

The reason this is (and the reason automatic updates from Microsoft has been a bit of a hoax) is because IE10 is not supported on Vista or XP. So effectively (and quite outrageously) we as web developers have to wait until XP and Vista die off before we can be totally free of IE9. This is a pretty common feature of Internet Explorer versions so don’t expect it to disappear in the future.

Support

So the big thing we’re worried about is support. IE has been going to great lengths to declare itself as one of the best browsers out there in advertising campaigns but do the stats actually weigh up? Well, yes, actually. IE11 (according to Can I Use..) will support 72% of all specifications (including unofficial). This is lower than the current version of Safari by 1%, and lower than the current version of Chrome by 16%. The improvement is about 5% better support from the IE10.

What IE11 will support

This list is not all inclusive but it definitely includes most of the main things that you will notice when IE11 hits the proverbial internet shelves.

Border Images

Full Screen API

3D Graphics via WebGL and Javascript

SPDY Networking Protocol

Mutation Observer – way to observe changes in the DOM

Support for vmax and vmin units (vh and vw introduced in IE9

Device Orientation Events (supposedly buggy)

Touch Based Drag and Drop HTML5 Events (not clear if only touch based

Attribute ‘aria-haspopup’ for hover effects activating on first touch on mobile devices

Phone Number Detection

Is that enough?

Well, yes and no. It seems like a lot of things on the surface but you have to remember some other stuff too. The IE developer cycle is super long. IE10 came out a year ago. Chrome and Firefox releases happen all the time, and they’re open source. So IE11 will have all this new stuff but by the time IE12 comes out, Chrome and Firefox will be lightyears ahead again, and so the cycle continues. It seems like we can’t shake the burden of IE just yet, but fortunately market share for IE is decreasing, so it will become less of a burden in the future.

Also, 72% support for all major specs ain’t so bad for Internet Explorer, so we can hope IE will become less troublesome in the future.

Support for older versions of IE is even worse than you describe. Windows XP does not support IE9; users are stuck with IE8 (if IE is their browser choice). So in reality, we can’t stop support IE8 until XP dies off.

What Jeremy describes is absolutely correct. XP cannot install anything beyond IE8. And the Vista debacle made many IT departments not upgrade to Vista and take a long look at Win 7 before adoption. Many are still running XP, especially in the public and government sectors. Microsoft stopping support for XP in 2014 will likely help, but the point you make about open source can’t be emphasized enough. As long as IE remains closed, support for the browser will continue to be a boat anchor around every web dev’s neck. Doesn’t matter how awesome IE version whatever is if 80% of your user base aren’t running that version.

It’s a shame too, because if IE wasn’t so stuck to operating system versions we could actually be entering an era in web design with very few limits. Unfortunately we’re going to have to wait a lot longer for that.

While your post does say that the list of features is not all inclusive, it does miss out *a lot* of things. While sites such as caniuse.com are fantastic, they don’t always include every feature; especially for things that come first to IE.

Many of these are not included on sites like caniuse or HTML5test, and considering the turn around time between IE10 and 11 has been shorter than it has been for a while between major versions of IE, it is a fair amount to add.

Yeah, IE11 is an improvement upon IE10 and it does introduce a fair amount of stuff. However, I really think the development cycle of IE stifles any flexibility it has over features to add and not add, and probably greatly limits features they would’ve added since they have to choose carefully which to include.